The End of Living:
carrick bell and Rocco Ruglio-Misurell

Feb 18 - Mar 12, 2023

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present The End of Living, a two-person exhibition of new work by carrick bell and Rocco Ruglio-Misurell. Consisting of video and sound installation (bell) and sculpture, installation, and drawing (Ruglio-Misurell), The End of Living sketches out proposals for scavenging pleasure, hope, and connection in a long apocalyptic now with no guarantee of a future in sight.

This exhibition is the second part of an exchange between artist-run spaces in Berlin and Los Angeles; in 2022, bell & Ruglio-Misurell hosted an exhibition of work from the member artists of TSALA in their Berlin-based non-profit space, Horse & Pony.

The End of Living takes its name from an inversion of New Queer Cinema filmmaker Gregg Araki’s first feature-length film, The Living End. Shot on a minuscule budget with few resources and fewer permits, Araki’s film took the crisis of a specific community (in this case, the AIDS epidemic at a particular moment in the early 1990s) and spun it into a broader generational existential crisis. Flavored with a strong dose of premillennialist doom, the film asks how we can continue living in a world that is clearly in its death throes. Following two HIV-positive men on a Bonnie and Clyde tour of the American West, The Living End writes a new mythology for how sex, ethics, friendship, and subcultural resistance can be sustained in a world whose centers of meaning and coherence have been fractured and sold off.

bell’s new video and sound installation directly engages the source material The Living End, consisting of a multi-screen video installation mounted to a wrought iron fence installed in front of the gallery’s windows. The video installation samples, distorts, and re-edits key fragments from  v. that amplify and elaborate moments of physical and erotic (dis)connection, the repetition and abstraction of found visual material proposing that, rather than seeking to escape where we find ourselves, we would do best to dig in and find our way through.

Ruglio-Misurell will present a new body of work using personal experiences of the body, erotic touch, and clothing as the starting point. Pulling from his personal wardrobe, Ruglio-Misurell uses his former clothing to create freestanding sculptures, reliefs and hanging objects through casting and hardening the material. Garments such as jean cut-offs, jockstraps, tank tops, and button-downs are cut up, so only the seams and hems remain to show outlines of bodies. The altered garments have been soaked in Jesmonite (acrylic resin), making them hard once dry, and displayed on foil-covered pedestals. Using literal scraps and a mixture of constructed and found debris, these sculptures assemble leftovers, traces, casts, and impressions to tell fragments of stories. These works don’t offer easy kj to how to escape the disasters our generations have inherited, but they do have some propositions for how we can enjoy ourselves and each other as we try to repair.

Rocco Ruglio-Misurell is a Berlin-based artist with a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was born in Newark, NJ. In 2009, Ruglio-Misurell received a Fulbright Fellowship to Berlin. Exhibitions include a solo show at Dzialdov in Berlin (2022), Jak zapomnieć in Kraków (2019), a two-person show at KH7artspace in Aarhus, Denmark(2018), a solo show at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, VT (2017), and a two-person show at LVL3 in Chicago (2016). Past residencies include OxBow (2019), Mass Moca (2017), The Wassaic Project (2017), Vermont Studio Center (2016), Skowhegan (2011), and Ox-Bow (2008).

Along with carrick bell, Ruglio-Misurell is the co-director of Horse & Pony, an artist-run studio and non-profit exhibition space with the aim of providing artists, curators, and other project spaces the opportunity to extend or act outside of their existing practices.

carrick bell is a Berlin-based video artist and PhD researcher at Chelsea College of Arts. Bell received their MFA from SAIC in 2008, and a BA from Hampshire College in 2004. They have taught at Northwestern University and delivered lectures for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Residencies include Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Residency (2018); Crosstown Arts, Memphis (2018); NARS Foundation (2017); the Wassaic Project (2016) and Ox-Bow (2009). They have exhibited at KH7artspace (Aarhus), Chelsea College (London), Beverly’s New York, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna) Charim Gallery (Vienna), LW56 (Vienna), .hbc (Berlin), Brooklyn Pavillion of the Shanghai Biennial, and BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). They have received stipends for artistic research (Berlin, 2021) and project space programming (Berlin, 2022). They are the co-founder and co-director of Berlin-based artist-run space Horse & Pony, and founder and programmer of Xanadu, a space for artists’ moving image work.